2. start with "what's new?"

Coming up with some kind of workflow mantra might be useful here. Looking at what's new, comparing it with what's known and situating incoming data with current knowledge and knowledge needs could work well.

3. move things to counter occlusion

Much of the giCentre work aims to minimise occlusion. We want to be able to see everything concurrently even if we have to move stuff around.

5. need is* determined by location (cursor | eye | data)* could be

In a way Bertifier does this, revealing different controls in different paces, but we may be able to use this kind of approach in more specialized and sophisticated ways.

6. moving containers (view and token) to different places has effect.

Where you put things gives them properties ... and relates them together. When you move them - this effects meaning. BUT - see [3] above!

7. always have a description* of configuration in natural language. * this could be a control

It was tough to get an interpretable title for all of the PlaceSurvey views - even those generated through filtering and conditioning. But we just about managed this - have a go, and look at the paper - Slingsby et al. (2014).

I was really impressed by GLO-STIX at InfoVis (Stolper et al., 2014) and this might be able to use description as control. Have a look at the short video for some nice ideas that might influence our approach.

EXCITING IDEAS THAT MAY BE INFLUENTIAL >>

I showed a few examples of nice designs and interactions that I think folks should consider for the initial designs ...

Venice Unfolding - Nagel et al. (2010) - Till Nagel's polyhedral object and unfolding mapping libraries result in an interesting tangible artefact acting as a control to spatial information. See the video and other information on the Venice Unfolding page.

Response Glyphs - Kachkaev et al (2013) - More giCentre work, this time to show large numbers of reviews of documents by a large number of reviewers. Collections of reviews are aggregated by document and reviewer for comparison in a highly interactive, linked, reconfigurable interface. The video explains all of this nicely.